Dancer 1

 

 

I wanted to kill Puck; Wilson wanted to kill me.

            So, we three chased each other up Spruce Street to the Great Falls.

            Paterson’s once noble mills stood to either side of us like brick grave stones, fog filling in the windows instead of glass with the pale glow of trash can fires oozing out door-less doorframes from where the junkies and bums kept warm.

            This was March 1987.

            Although the calendar claimed Spring has arrived, Winter kept its firm grip on the Silk city so that even running as we were up the steep incline from the end of Market Street, we barely broke a sweat – even the bumbling, bund of blubber Wilson, who had more bulk over his belt than behind it, he huffing and puffing as hard as he could yet still could not catch me.

            I had better luck with Puck.

            I had winged him back at the bar and his glittering trail of blood on the sidewalk suggested he was sinking fast, but still I was determined to squeeze off another shot before he took another leap from the falls to try and escape me.

            Puck was a pint-sized package of evil surprises, so I new I would need to be quick if I intended to kill him. He had slipped through nets as tight as this before, one time even leaping from the falls to fake his death when the cops closed in on him.

            Although the twilight city was alive with the sound of sires as the Mayor’s anti-corruption task force rooted out each of Puck’s known dens in search of him, only me and Wilson had seen Puck flee the back of the strip club on Market Street as the rest of the cops kicked in the front door.

            Wilson, who was as crooked a cop as he was fat, hoped to put a bullet in me before I got Puck, thus silencing the only person who could absolutely testify to his corrupt dealing with Puck’s criminal empire.

            While my shot back at the club had caught Puck’s shoulder, Wilson’s shot at me had hit the door frame, showering me with splinters but otherwise unharmed.

            Thus Wilson was f4roced to give chase, a feat he’s not performed in twenty years and more than 100-pounds ago, and he was soon left in the fog behind us, more sound and fury than capable of any of the threats he shouted between his gulps of breath – each threat about as effective at stopping me as his bullets had been back at the bar.

            Puck, on the other hand, maintained a grim silence, reserving his energy for flight, perhaps planning to cast back one last laugh at me as he leaped.

            Yet, I could hear him huffing almost as hard as Wilson was, gasping for air as his wound drained him. He even stopped briefly to lean on a mail box, fleeing again only when he saw my determined shape emerge from the fog, close enough almost for a clear shot.

            Patrons at the Falls View Diner half way up the hill stared out at us as we passed, their terrified faces framed by the window as they feared we might turn our wrath on them, though also clearly fascinated, knowing full well they were witnessing a bit of history they would read in the headlines by morning.

            Puck reached the gate to the falls park first, paused only long enough to check my progress before he plunged in.

            I was not far behind him, though he had crossed the yard by the time I reached the gate, rattling the locked gate to the footbridge over which he had intended to flee, from which he had made his leap the last time.

            A highly publicized attempted suicide from that bridge had caused the mayor to order it closed.

            Puck, who had clearly intended to repeat past history, glanced desperately around, his blonde head twisting this way and that in search of an alterative, which he suddenly saw – a rusting water duct that crossed the falls gap slightly farther out from the footbridge.

            His forehead glistened if not with sweat, then with the intense moisture churned up by the voracious falls below, fed by melting snow the mountains west of Paterson.

            As I lifted my pistol, Puck darted nimbly over the already sagging barrier of barbed wire and soon stood atop the wide curved top of the rusting duct.

            He looked victorious at his accomplishment, even grinned back at me, laughing as he turned, showing almost no surprise until my pistol sparked and his chest erupted with another wound.

            The impact sent him into a pivot from which he could not recover, his last expression stunned before he took a plunge he would not survive, his body thumbing on the jagged jaws his previous jump at avoided, coming to a halt at the lip of one stone where an errant stream fell from the fall – the chilled water washing away the blood to reveal a pale, and quite dead form the city would later need a lift to recover.

            Wilson arrived, but so, too, had several police cars, and the lifted Glock, Wilson intended to use to shoot  me with, slipped from his fingers to thumb on the ground, leaving the mayor’s task force to take us both into custody – Wilson charged with corruption, and me, with murder.

       ******************

The newspapers had a field day with the story, one headline reading, “Poets Kills the King of Paterson Mob.”

            This was not exactly accurate since I saw myself more as a songwriter than a poet, although the comp who came to my jail cell defined me as a suspect and wanted to know why I did it – sputtering a bit in reaction to my requesting an attorney.

            His thin moustache twitched.

            “This is only a formality,” he said.

            “But what I say can be used against me in court?”

            He sagged, his small hard eyes registering annoyance.

            “Look, Zarra,” he said in a stern tone. “We have three witnesses to the shooting. And unless you can make a case as to why you had to shoot him, I would say you’ll see a long time in prison.”

            “What do you want to know?”

            “How long did you know Fetterland?”

            “Know him?” I said, chuckling. “I’m not sure I ever knew him really. But I met him for the first time when I was 15 or 16.”

            “You knew Puck Fetterland that long?” the detective said, unable to contain his surprise.
            “We spent a lot of time on the street together,” I said. “God knows, I might have ended up just like him if other people hadn’t looked out for me.”

            “You sound like you feel sorry for him.”

            “Maybe I do.”

            “But you still shot him.”

            “Your words, not mine. If I got to go back to jail, I won’t help you put me there.”

            “You went to jail?” the detective said, again taken off guard. “I checked your record. You have no criminal convictions.”

            “I was a juvenile. I spent less than a week in the county jail waiting for my family to post bail.”

            “What was the charge?”

            “You have records. Look it up.”

            The detective stormed out.

 *********************

Puck Fetterland was one of those kids who just couldn’t keep out of trouble.

            If the cops got a call from the Lakeview section of the city, they immediately assumed Puck had something to do with it.

            He was the unnatural byproduct of a gay man’s marriage to a local prostitute, neither of whom wanted much to do with him after he was born – although when all was said and done, the father struggled to raise him until Puck got too wild to control, at which point, Puck went out into the world to fend for himself.

            Although I had seen Puck’s blonde head streaking through the streets of my neighborhood for some time, I hadn’t actually talked to him until he stopped me near the coffee shop. I was on an errand for my uncle.

            I found him leaning against the store window staring at me when I came out.

            “What are you staring at?” I asked.

            “You,” he said, making it sound like he mocked me.

            “Why?
            “I was wondering what you stole from the store.”

            “I didn’t steal anything,” I said.

            “Then why did you go in if all you came out with was a cup of coffee?”

            “Because my uncle sent me.”

            “You’re uncle? You live around here?”

            I pointed up the hill at the cream-colored Victorian house my family owned.

            “You live there?” he said in disbelief.

            “I said I did, didn’t I?”

            “Then you must be rich,” he said, straightening up so that he no longer leaned against the glass. “Maybe I ought to beat you up and take your money.”

            I laughed and his forehead crinkled, giving him an annoyed, yet puzzled look.

            “What the fuck are you laughing at?” he asked.

            “You.”

            “Why?”

            “Because you’re so silly.”

            “You’re starting to piss me off.”

            “And you stink. Don’t you ever take a bath?”

            “Now you have pissed me off.”

            “Why don’t you come to my house? I’m sure my uncles will let you wash.”

            “Get the fuck away from me!” he said, turning to leave, but stopping abruptly to turn and look at me again. “Sure, you’re rich. Maybe you can go get me some money?”

            “I don’t have any money.”

            “You’re full of shit, you living in a mansion like that.”

            “No, we’re really not rich.”

            “Maybe I’ll come over one night and take a look for myself.”

            “And wash up?”

            “Fuck off!”

            Then I asked him how he got so dirty. Didn’t his mother make him take a bath?

            “My mother don’t care what I do as long as I don’t do it near her,” he said. “Mostly she makes me sleep outside when she has her men friends over.”

            “Outside? What does your father say about that?”

            “That faggot? He wants even less to do with me unless it’s to fuck me up the ass. That’s why I go over to my mother’s place when I can, or sleep on the street.”

            “Where does your mother live?” I asked.

            “Over there,” he said, pointing diagnolly across the street.

            “In the bar?”

            “No, in the apartment above it,” Puck said. “She gets a lot of business from downstairs.”

            “And your father? Where does he live.”

            “Downtown.”

            “Where?”

            “You ask too many questions. Don’t you have to go home or something.”

            “Oh, God, yes,” I said. “My uncle hates his coffee cold.”

            

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